Book Review: Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
| Author | Michael Mann |
| Published date | 01 September 2017 |
| Date | 01 September 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0305829817721097 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829817721097
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2017, Vol. 46(1) 87 –90
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829817721097
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Book Review
Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone
Age to the Twenty-First Century, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017, 528 pp. ISBN:
9780691165028 (hbk).
We have all become aware of the enormous recent growth of inequality in most countries
of the world. In 26 well-evidenced countries listed by Scheidel (pp. 405–8), the share of
the top 1 percent of the population in total income grew by half between 1980 and 2010,
and is still growing. Scheidel begins his book with the statistic that the richest 62 persons
in the world in 2015 owned as much net private wealth as the poorer half of humanity,
more than 3.5 billion people. Such statistics are a matter of concern, even of alarm, to
most of us. Yet Scheidel says that they are perfectly normal in the history of human socie-
ties ever since human groups first managed to produce an economic surplus. In fact, he
says, trends towards greater equality have only occurred in very unusual and dire circum-
stances, in the wake of four great disasters, what he calls ‘the four horsemen’ (of the
apocalypse) – mass mobilisation wars, transformative, violent revolutions, the collapse
of states and civilisations, and lethal pandemics. We have only two choices: either mas-
sive death tolls or massive inequality. There is no good news in this book, except for a
few final wishful waves made at the future.
Scheidel, seeks to prove this bold, sweeping, and horrific argument with the help of
extensive empirical research centred on the construction of Quasi-Gini coefficients of
inequality. Note, however, that he only attempts to chronicle inequality within countries
or civilisations. He does not discuss inequalities between countries. Since the Second
World War Gini coefficients are real enough, even if of varying quality, calculated from
government records of incomes, wealth or taxes. For the rest of human history Scheidel
imputes them roughly from all kinds of data – chroniclers estimates, goods found in
graves, the size of unearthed houses and palaces, and the like. Scheidel is well aware of
the dubious worth of much of these data (he is a classical historian, after all), but none-
theless feels that it is better to give some such estimates, however crude, than no esti-
mates at all, and he has a point. I will suspend disbelief in his figures, in fact I am greatly
impressed by his ingenuity in constructing his data-sets, although specialists in many
times and places might disagree. This is a very brave attempt to say very important things
backed up by enormous empirical research.
I will comment on the four horsemen in turn. First, mass mobilisation warfare, which
occupies the largest slice of the book. Scheidel takes the two 20th century World Wars as
721097MIL0010.1177/0305829817721097Millennium: Journal of International StudiesBook Review
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